Since 2011, I have been a voluntary guide at the National Gallery of Victoria. One of the real pleasures of being a voluntary guide is the opportunity to engage with visitors and communicate something of my enthusiasm, knowledge and experience of the Gallery’s wonderful collections, encouraging others to ‘see what I can see’.
When I am guiding at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Australian artist Arthur Streeton’s The purple noon’s transparent might, 1896, sits at the top of my list of works for inclusion in a tour. Many viewers, especially international audiences but also people from closer to home, appreciate its evocation of a quintessentially Australian landscape.
The purple noon’s transparent might was the first painting by Streeton to be purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria, notably in its year of completion in 1896, and one of the first purchased by the Gallery from artists of their generation.
Arthur Streeton was a leading figure in the group of artists known as the Australian Impressionists, who worked en plein air to capture the essence of the Australian landscape and the transformative effects of Australian light. This painting provides an expansive view of the Hawkesbury River near Richmond, New South Wales, stretching from the bend in the river at Richmond Lowlands, looking south-west to the Blue Mountains in the far distance.
The title was drawn from an 1818 poem by English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley titled ‘Stanzas written in dejection near Naples’. Streeton often took poetry away with him to serve as inspiration for his work on his many solitary painting trips.
The painting was a logistical challenge, with Streeton working under a makeshift shelter to escape the 42-degree Celsius heat and painting the work outdoors in two days.1Footnote 1 Despite the uncomfortable conditions, he created an evocative impression of a landscape somnolent in the heat and stillness of a summer day.
Streeton soon developed a reputation as a master painter of distance. Fellow artist Lionel Lindsay said of Streeton: ‘No one can paint distance like him … Every touch here is sure and relevant of character’.2Footnote 2
Landscape artists use compositional guidelines that are sometimes not apparent to the untrained eye. These guidelines result in works that are aesthetically pleasing. They are not hard and fast rules but can be applied in part or in full depending on the scene being depicted. Streeton’s painting offers an opportunity to analyse how he may have used an underlying structure to compose this work and, as Lindsay suggested, ‘paint distance’ with such success.
As evident when looking at the work in its entirety, Streeton used a square format, which was most unusual for the time. The traditional format for a landscape painting was normally three units high and four units wide, with the height divided into three equal sections. Sometimes artists use the bottom third section for the foreground and mid-ground, and the middle and top third sections for the background and an expansive sky. In this example, Streeton provides a broad landscape view by extending his depiction across the full spread of the foreground and mid-ground, with only the top third of the canvas reserved for the background, mountains and the sky.
The sky is masked by hazy cloud, a typical feature of a hot Australian day, with Streeton applying transparent layers of grey and white paint over pale blue. A column of smoke rises centrally in the background. At this point, we see the first view of the meandering Hawkesbury River as it emerges from the background, a visual starting point in its journey through the landscape.
We follow the river’s path horizontally to the bend that sees its direction change, taking a diagonal course to finish in the bottom left corner of the composition. The river appears lighter at this point flowing over shallow water with the sun reflecting off its surface. A dab of rose madder marks the centre of the painting. Adjacent we see evidence of farm settlement and from there, the landscape rolls out to the river, hinterland and distant mountains.
Here, the river opens up, stretching across the full width of the canvas, appearing darker and stronger in hue as the viewer looks down on the surface of deeper water. The shrubbery of eucalyptus trees brings the viewer back to the artist’s viewpoint high above the river.
Brian Martin has been an NGV voluntary guide since 2011 and was President of the Guides Organising Committee at the time of writing.
This article first appeared in NGV Magazine, issue 25, November–December 2020.